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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
D. J. Ward
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 581-588
Fusion Technology Plenary | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST56-581
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Conceptions of the aims and characteristics of DEMOs are evolving in response to world issues. Many areas are important in these considerations: two particularly important, and technically related, ones are examined here.Firstly, in the recent Strategic Energy Technology plan (SET plan) in the EU, approaches to technological development that could substantially change the future energy supply system were investigated. For fusion, this included considering how fusion development could be accelerated, particularly whether construction of a DEMO plant could start earlier than is normally assumed, perhaps before full exploitation of ITER. This is described in the technology map of the EU SET plan as an Early DEMO, or EDEMO. In this context, reconsidering the balance of the arguments between a steady-state and a pulsed design for EDEMO is motivated by the possibility that a sufficiently reliable and efficient current drive system may not be available on the necessary timescale.Secondly, the context for a fusion power plant, and consequently for DEMO, is set by the assumed applications, amongst which hydrogen production is an important possibility. Although this is a very different issue from pulsed operation of a fusion plant, it may be crucial in setting the framework in which a fusion plant operates. Both issues have the potential to radically change the view of what a DEMO plant should do.